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posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?


[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?


[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Monday December 18 2017, @03:18PM (3 children)

    by RedBear (1734) on Monday December 18 2017, @03:18PM (#611415)

    Many are arguing that they don't care. I can't say that I care directly, but I am quite surprised that the incredibly knowledgeable and competent admins behind the scenes of SN can't find a simpler and more stable way to make such social media integration happen. Twitter isn't exactly MySpace, there's no sign that it will be dying anytime soon. Surely there are managed packages available somewhere to make it work.

    On the other hand, seems like Twitter may be better suited to being a side-band notification channel offering info on major SN site updates, problems and META discussions. Kind of like IRC.

    So maybe leave it alone until a simpler, more stable integration solution can be found.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @03:44PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @03:44PM (#611423) Homepage Journal

    Surely there are managed packages available somewhere to make it work.

    Oh there are. I'd rather not make them essential parts of Rehash though. Libraries like that have a bad tendency to become unmaintained as the maintainer loses interest in the platform. That and it's really not a terribly difficult bit of code to write, given our extremely modest feature needs (authentication and posting).

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday December 18 2017, @06:08PM (1 child)

    by Arik (4543) on Monday December 18 2017, @06:08PM (#611506) Journal
    "I can't say that I care directly, but I am quite surprised that the incredibly knowledgeable and competent admins behind the scenes of SN can't find a simpler and more stable way to make such social media integration happen. "

    Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

    "Social media integration" is a flaw, not a feature.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?